“The Mozilla development community has rolled out the latest beta of its Firefox 3.6 browser. In addition to the usual round of bug fixes, Firefox 3.6 beta version 5, comes with a number of new features and performance enhancements. The browser offers the ability for users to easily reskin the browsers with a new visual theme. The new version can also run scripts asynchronously, which should speed load times of pages that have multiple scripts. The new release also aims to appease cutting-edge developers, with support for various new standards.”
The day I can walk away from my MacBook Pro and not have Firefox cause the battery to drain to nothing because the machine can’t go to sleep after being inactive, I’ll considering using Firefox again.
Oh, and Firefox is a huge CPU hog. Load the same set of idle (no animations or flash) web pages in Firefox and Safari, and Firefox will use several times as much CPU load.
I had switched to Firefox from Safari because Firefox has way better memory management. For the same web pages, Firefox uses way less memory, and it’s good about returning memory to the OS when you close tabs. The problem is that Firefox uses additonal CPU time for each open tab. Instead of being event-driven, it does lots of polling, I guess. So to reduce CPU usage to an acceptable level (so I can move the notebook around without being teathered), I end up closing pages anyhow. So what’s the point? I have to minimize open pages due to memory usage on Safari of Firefox due to CPU overhead. So I switched back to Safar, because then the machine will actually sleep like it should. (And Safari looks prettier, and has resizable edit fields and works well on the Mac. And with Saft, it has good enough ad-blocking and crash protection.)
Sounds like the browser you’re really after is Camino
If they take so long for the next big update, Camino won’t be anyone’s choice. I gave it up a long time ago.
The Firefox 3.6 nightly builds have been so good from alpha through the current 3.6.6pre beta. If they can get the plug-in compliance up past 70 %, it would be good. Who wants to go without a specific plug-in that hasn’t worked past version 3.0.x?
Apparently not. I just tried the latest Camino, and it has some of the same bugs. For instance, it too prevents Macs from sleeping.
I upgraded yesterday from 3.5 and yes, for the first time, you can feel those “speed improvements”, page load faster, switching tabs with more than 20 open cause no delay at all (except gmail, but that was predictable) and it just feel fast, just as chrome.
3.6 will be a great release, 3.7 with multi process (if it is not delayed, they are behind schedule on that one) will be even better.
XUL-ui is great for hackers like me, having a DOM structure available right away is the best thing you can have to extend the interface and skin it with CSS.
I’ve already switched to Chrome.
Faster, now has plugins, and more responsive.
The fact that Firefox use only one process is really something that isn’t good at all !!
And the time I lose when writing the address and he start searching in his database that time (not in // but in sequencial…)
Well, yeah, but althogh Chrome is doing a good job in terms of running the tabs in seperate processes it seems too scary for me right now in terms of privacy. I uninstalled it from all my machines. I don’t like the fact that it leaves the googleupdate backdoor:
npgoogleoneclick5.dll, and IE BHO: goopdatebho.dll
Also even after you uninstall it, it leaves 2 scheduled tasks in the system.
Also I don’t like the spy^H^H^H “usage tracking” features that other forks like IRON feel is good to remove:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Usage_tracking
OTOH, yes, firefox is a bad on CPU usage. I’ll try the betas.
On a tangential note, I’ve noticed a number of posts lately which imply that Chrome runs each tab in its own process. Isn’t the default mode “process per site”, though, with “process per tab” being another option?
From a privacy standpoint… Chromium’s code is open. You can use that rather than Google’s binary.
That wouldn’t help as Chromium actually contains most of the user tracking stuff:
From: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_faq.php
You run source code now? On a related note, it is always fun to audit such a huge code base that any modern browser carries. Well, “someone in the Internet” will do it. I guess we have to trust him.
Don’t be silly.
The point is that it puts Chromium at roughly the same trust-level as Mozilla Corporations’s Firefox. But essentially, yes, one is trusting the “Many Eyeballs” view. And while I’ve made my criticisms of that in other posts, I do think that, on the balance, it’s a better bet than trusting an opaque binary, compiled from a code-base which the community cannot see.
And in this case, it looks like the Iron guys have looked it over and voiced some complaints which I will comment upon, briefly, in another post.
Edited 2009-12-19 19:00 UTC
The following is not optional:
Encoded string, according to Google, contains non-identifying information such as when Chrome was installed.
Other than the installation date, what other “non-identifying” information is sent out every 24 hours and every Google search query and when “significant events occur”?
Microsoft might try to keep you locked into their products, but Google seems hell-bent on sticking their nose in our business.
“Microsoft might try to keep you locked into their products, but Google seems hell-bent on sticking their nose in our business. ”
and millions of facebook/twitter users are hell-bent on sticking their business in our noses!
FF 3.7 nightlies are where the action is. Flash as a separate process is really nice (actually, that is all the multiprocess I want, I don’t think I would get any benefit from per-tab processes).
As a Linux x86_64 user, Flash as a seperate process is something that I’ve simply taken for granted for quite some time now. It’s not rocket science. It’s just nspluginwrapper.
As a Linux x86_64 user… I live without Flash completely. Come to think of it, as a NoScript user, I do that on every platform, all the time!
Ditto. And guess what? Haven’t missed it a bit.
Flash? Silverlight? Moonlight? HTML5? It is all same crap to me. More flash and bling, less content. The future of the internet.
Careful, Kroc might bite your head off!
Doesn’t that come with some pretty bad performance hits and bugs? Or has that all been fixed now?
Edited 2009-12-19 01:48 UTC
Works great. No performance hit at all. And it isolates the browser from any plugin crashes. You can easily kill a misbehaving plugin without affecting the browser session. Fedora uses nspluginwrapper even for 32 bit, IIRC.
I decided to give Chrome a chance since it now supports extensions. Has firefox finally met its match?
Well, the verdict is clear: there is no comparison, especially with the *one Firefox extension that everyone uses* that you wonder how users of other browsers can do without.
I don’t care how fast or how many other features other browsers have. I refuse to use an internet that’s full of junk that I’m not interested in.
You mean this one?
http://tinyurl.com/yfbarc4
Could you please be specific on what that one extension is? The people that I know personally that use FF, myself included, don’t use any extensions at all.
Probably AdBlock+, which is available for Chrome. However, in general, I get the feeling that the whole extension thing is:
1. A security bomb waiting to go off.
2. Mozilla Corporation’s own flavor of ‘user lock in’.
I avoid them. But then again, I avoid Firefox, as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat -> check
I avoid FF because the current Epiphany is a better browser. I merely note where Firefox is almost certainly headed for trouble. Your complacency is duely noted. But rest assured that after the shit hits the fan, you’ll still be able to either deny the problem outright, or blame it on Microsoft in some way.
I fail to see how extensions are either a form of lock-in or a particular security risk. True, users will have to exercise a degree of discretion in selecting which extensions to trust and install, but that’s pretty much true of all software — even with package management in a Linux distribution, you’re trusting the distribution authors, and the people packaging the software (which is probably fairly safe). I really don’t see how the ability to install and use NoScript somehow degrades my browser’s security.
And I don’t really see how they’re a lock-in either. Calling something a lock-in implies that steps are deliberately being taken to prevent competitors from implementing a similar feature, or preventing compatibility with competitors’ products. The FireFox team is doing neither, to my knowledge: if google gets their extension framework sorted out and NoScript gets ported (or a function-alike is created), then there won’t really be anything the FireFox team can do, and I wouldn’t expect them to try prevent such an occurrence anyway.
Edit: And, when did Epiphany become more than Gecko in GTK decorations?
Edited 2009-12-22 17:53 UTC
When it discarded Gecko in favor of Webkit, in 2.28.
If you are talking about Adblock, be aware that the ad-blocking extensions for Chrome don’t really block ads so much as hide them from view. Your bandwidth and page-loading time will still be consumed for someone to send you advertising content, even if that content is not displayed to you.
http://www.chromeplugins.org/google/chrome-plugins/blocking-ads-hid…
Edited 2009-12-21 11:53 UTC
Plus, they can still feed you with all those crunchy cookies to track you across the net. There’s currently no match for Adblock Plus on Chrome simply because AFAIK Chrome does not have an API for content filtering (yet). Probably for good reason as advertisement is Google’s bread and butter business and it shouldn’t be *too* easy (that is: impossible) to write an efficient and effective advertisement blocker.
funny how on osnews if you wanna troll you just need to do it in 2 subsequent posts, then you can only vote down a user once per thread.
oh yes, thats you, the troll.
Edited 2009-12-21 22:24 UTC
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Which is exactly what people need for supporting sites they care about (like OSNews) while sparing themselves the pain of the seething, gyrating ads.
All AdBlocking software should have that option.
And I’m wondering comments googleninja might have about this, since his view on the topic of ad blockers differs from that of many of us.
Edited 2009-12-21 16:52 UTC
It isn’t a feature as far as I can see.
I can’t see where it can be considered a fair and reasonable contract where the end user gets to pay for equipment and communications bandwidth for commercial interests to us in showing unwanted ads.
Sites like OSNews.com and LWN.net are hardly “commercial interests”, lemur. But If you pay for bandwidth by the MB, I can see where you might prefer to pay the subscription fee for sites you frequent. But you wouldn’t want to just freeload, would you, lemur?
Heh, actually, sometimes I do: I’m paying the all of $5.00 a month that a subscription to LWN costs. I think it’s reasonable to ask the users of a website to support it, and I’d prefer to do so with a modest financial contribution rather than adds, if given the choice (at least for sites I’m going to frequent).
And I leave NoScript on all the time — which doubles in many respects as an add-blocker, since it prevents flash content from executing.
I don’t have any particular intent to freeload, but I still don’t see any reason why large corporate interests should be able to freeload off my equipment and communications bandwidth costs in order to be able to place their adverts.
If I want their product, I will search for it. If what I find is good value (as determined by me), I will happily pay for it. I will tolerate inconspicuous, low-bandwidth, unobtrusive text links such as Google shows. I do not otherwise give any corporations permission to use my property for their advertising purposes.
Edited 2009-12-23 05:26 UTC
How about the fact that they are paying the costs for running the sites you freeload off of? I can understand, very well, not tolerating the flashing, dancing, gyrating ads. But the current arrangement under Chrome allows the starving admins and editors of the site, who’s content you are currently freeloading, to pay the bills without your having to actually suffer the ads. Balking under such circumstances is just pathetic.
And don’t bother trying to evoke images of “large commercial interests” when the topic here is clearly small, non-profit, mom and pop discussion sites which you find enjoyable and useful, but don’t mind ripping off anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, OSNews is not Exxon Corp.
You know, if the advertiser pays for adds that aren’t displayed, then the advertiser is getting ripped off, and it’s entirely possible that the company trying to advertise their product is also just a li’l, sympathetic Mom and Pop, not a huge, unsympathetic MegaCorp. Downloading the add and not displaying it is not a perfect, egalitarian solution: somebody’s still getting screwed, it’s just someone you don’t care about.
But when you talk about ad-blocking in terms of moral imperatives and the life-and-death of websites, I think I can safely say that we’re dealing with some pretty inflated rhetoric.
Of course, the right thing to do is not use an ad blocker at all. But people *do* want to use ad blockers. And so they invent ways to justify that. Just the way they justify it whenever they want to take something without paying for it, and they know that no one can stop them.
I happen to think that an unwillingness even to have ads transferred but not displayed is particularly pathetic.
I’m surprised that you would say such a thing, since:
1. I never said anything about moral imperatives. It’s a matter of ethics and practical reality.
2. The life and death of sites like this one very literally do hinge upon ad revenue.
Or did you think that there was some sort of Website Fairy that paid the bills for the sites you visit?
Edited 2009-12-23 22:40 UTC
Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, Flash content has caused my FF to crash all the time. Not sure whether to lay the blame at Adobe or Firefox, probably a combination. I just hope it gets fixed fast… it’s already been like this with little improvement for way too long.
I’m so happy for sbergman27 that he found a new topic which excites him so much after his long-running (one-sided) feud with KDE seemed to run slowly out of steam recently. Cracking job, old chap.